The following description relates to an exchange infrastructure for collaborative business systems.
Companies face an increasing need for integration of and collaboration among their information and enterprise software systems. In most current system landscapes, many components are directly connected in a one-to-one relationship with other components, with the integration capabilities hardwired into the application components and individual mappings programs. Under these conditions, collaborative sharing of information or process control tends to be difficult if not impossible. Upgrades, changes, or extensions to an infrastructure of directly connected components are challenging and resource-intensive.
Electronic business collaboration, however, increasingly requires connectivity among all applications inside and outside of company boundaries. Networks such as the Internet provide opportunities for systems to communicate almost quickly and easily with other systems or individuals. Business processes that once were restricted to intranets and their users are now moving to the Internet to become an effective composition of Web services. A Web service is a programmable, self-contained, self-describing, modular application function that can be published, discovered or invoked through an open Internet standard.
While technical connectivity can be achieved using new open protocols and standards like the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and extensible markup language (XML), the challenge of mapping different business semantics remains. To capture future rounds of efficiency gains, enterprises increasingly will be required to deploy a new breed of collaborative business processes that cross enterprises or functions within an enterprise. In addition, enterprises will increasingly need to process real-dme scenarios instead of performing batch processing. These collaborative processes will have significantly more sophisticated integration requirements than traditional processes.
One solution for technical connectivity includes receiving a message from a sender in the sender's native file format, converting the message to XML for integration processing and routing, and re-converting the XML message to a receiver's native format. Each process of converting the message includes identifying a recipient or group of recipients, determining a routing of the message to the recipient(s), and mapping the message to a new format.